Join us in standing with Ahmed and promoting Engineering in schools on Thursday night by making your own DIY clock. Browse our junk drawers, grab some LEDs, and slap together your best Improvised Timekeeping Device. We have plenty of soldering irons and there will be people around to help out if you’re new with electronics. Philosophers will also be on hand if you have trouble with the concept of time itself.

Craft Night is one of NYC Resistor’s weekly open-to-the-public nights. We’ll be there from about 6:30 p.m. until time stops making sense, at 87 3rd Ave (and Bergen Street) in Brooklyn, just a few blocks from the Atlantic Ave / Barclays Center subway stop.

Have you ever envied those beautiful green PCBs that all modern electronics have? Do you want to kick up the professionalism in your projects with a real PCB? Would you like to simply learn how to better document your circuits with a nicely done schematic?

Last weekend was the awesome Art Hack Day hackathon, organized in part by Resistor member David Huerta and Resistor friend Shayna Gentiluomo. Artists from all over were invited to the awesome Pioneer Works space in Red Hook, Brooklyn, where they met, brainstormed, and executed on a wide array of ideas spanning many mediums, in less than 48 hours.

I showed up uninvited, glued a Beaglebone Black to a Pringles can, and ended up with a note on Makezine:

Built with an A-version BeagleBone Black, this WiFi Taser by Max Henstell turned a Pringles can into an antenna gun of sorts, using Python to send deauth packets to knock nearby laptops off wi-fi.

Resistor member Adam Mayer and 3D artist Bradley Rothenberg put together this awesome robot utilizing a broken security camera that I rescued off the Google building after Hurricane Sandy:

Last Robot Left Alive, by Bradley Rothenberg and Adam Mayer. The installation postulated the resurrection of a broken security camera that fell to the ground, likely due to wind sheer from Hurricane Sandy.

My silent favorite of the show wasn’t operating optimally, but I know where this one comes from. Monster Mash, by Olivia Barr and Ariel Cotton, turned upcycled junk into a creature from the Gowanus Canal, a nearby Superfund site with record levels of pollutants.

On Friday night I experienced what is probably my most spectacular hardware failure yet. I was working on a project for our upcoming Interactive Show, a chandelier with 150 or so individually controllable 5 watt incandescent bulbs:

A small piece of the chandelier during testing.

Anyway, it was way too late and I was rushing to get the last controller board finished on the outer ring of the chandelier, which has 7 controllers and 52 lightbulbs. I plugged the very last controller in backwards and flipped the switch…Continue reading »

I’d like to share a neat Eagle hack for all our the people who have taken our Eagle CAD classes (myself included) and our Eagle-using friends.

BOM-EX is nifty little ULP (User Language Program) that extends the functionality of the built-in BOM ULP. BOM-EX not only helps you assemble a coherent BOM (Bill of Materials) right from your Eagle schematic, but it also makes it easy to assemble a database of parts, and associate those parts with parts numbers for DigiKey, Mouser, Newark, etc.

I made a nice little script that lets me build my BOM database without ever leaving the DigiKey website…

Some friends at a local university reached out to us recently and offered to let us rescue a robot from a junkyard fate. Not being in the business of turning down free robots, we quickly agreed. Three of us showed up on Monday in a Ford Escape. We left in a U-Haul.

This beast of a machine weighs in at 550lbs. It’s a Gilson Cyberlab C400 Automated Plate Preparation Workstation. We’re not exactly sure what that is, but we do know that it has a huge robotic gantry meant to move at high speed with accurate positioning. And it has neuroprobes. What are we going to do with it? Maybe it will be the next BarBot. Or a 3D Printer. Or maybe some sort of exercise machine. We’re not sure yet. Check the vids.

It’s like the previous Arduino post, except that it’s this coming Saturday instead of having already happened. Unless you read this after Saturday, in which case, boy oh boy, you sure did miss an excellent Arduino class. Best one I’ve been to, that’s for sure.